Home again

I arrived back home again yesterday; my trip back east seemed terribly short.  Stacey’s wedding was lovely; the ceremony was held in a music hall that has an enormous pipe organ the size of the whole front wall of the building.

The pipe organ; it was very impressive, covered with ornate wood carvings.

It was all quite impressive.  The reception was great too; I got to see a lot of old friends and danced the night away.

Mom and Dad on the dance floor. Don't they look snazzy?

Now, home again, I have a lot of work to do.  I applied to 18 schools, so now I have 18 secondary applications to complete.  However, my common application was accepted, processed, and verified, so that means I did it right and it wasn’t rejected.  I was worried about that, because if they didn’t take it I’d have missed a lot of deadlines, seeing as how I sent it in at the last minute.

Last night Brian and I went out to eat at the Outback (thanks Carolyn and Dale!) to celebrate having finished the first step of this application process.  It’s always a treat to have someone else cook for me, as it happens so rarely.

Today I will start with the Harvard application, as it’s due first.  Onwards!

Scaredy cat

Today I am driving myself to Portland; tomorrow morning I get on a plane back to Massachusetts, again.  This time my trip is short, less than a week.

When I was gone for almost a month last time, some good came out of it here at home, in that Brian and Chester finally became friends.  It took me months to befriend Chester while he was still living out in the backyard, and though Brian fed him occasionally, Chester really wanted nothing to do with the big loud scary man.  When we brought Chester inside we immediately appointed Brian the title of “breakfast man,” hoping that Chester’s opinion of him would improve when he noticed that big and scary though he is, he is also the keeper of the wet food.  It was a good idea, but it worked only so well–he’d rub agains Brian’s legs while he was dishing out the food, but the minute Chester had finished wolfing down his breakfast he reverted to scaredy cat.  When I was away, though, Chester had to make a decision.  You see, he actually really does like people, and is a sucker for pets–so when I wasn’t around, he had to either get pets from the scary man or else go without for a month.  Fortunately, he decided Brian isn’t so scary after all…

Dress up

I think it more tasteful to refrain from posting the "before" picture...

Well, Stacey’s wedding is coming up, it’s this Saturday in fact, and I’m flying back east (yet again!) on Thursday.  So, today, in the interest of being able to wear an actual dress for the event, and for the first time in many years, I waxed my legs.  Stac, don’t ever say I never did anything for you!  (Though really, I don’t find it painful–more like annoying, and messy.  If you’ve never experienced it, leg wax is approximately the consistency of pine tree sap, and it has a similar ability to stick itself it any number of unexpected and remote surfaces.  I had to scrub down half the bathroom with “Goo Off” when I was done.)  Interestingly enough, now that my legs are more “girly” in a sense, they look more muscular than they did before…

I haven’t worn a fancy dress for about ten years, so I think it’ll be kind of fun to dress up.  I have also been attempting to apply eye makeup–again, I haven’t tried to do this since I was about ten years old–so that I’ll have some hope of being able to make myself look presentable this weekend.  There is a whole genre of videos on YouTube in which young ladies demonstrate how to apply eye makeup to achieve certain effects. This is very helpful, if, like me, one has a limited understanding of such things.  I watched a tutorial last night on how to create a purple “smokey eye” look, a process that involves about twenty steps, half of which require black eyeliner.

In thinking about it, when I was younger I rejected a number of the trappings of what I saw as “socially acceptable” femininity–makeup, girly shoes, “doing” my hair, and whatnot–many the things girls generally have to do to be seen as attractive in a mainstream way.  I feel like as I get older I care less about how people read my appearance.  Maybe because of that, many of the things I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing/wearing seem more and more like they could be a fun option.  I started wearing nail polish just last year for the first time in maybe a decade, and it occurred to me that I like painting my nails.  (Preferably with a safe and relatively green brand of polish, insofar as those things go…)  For a long time though I didn’t do it because I didn’t want others to read my nails as a sign that I was someone who believed that women have to paint their nails, or wear makeup in general, in order to look good.  It’s taken me a while, but I think I’m figuring out that keeping a couple of pairs of heels in the closet, as an option, doesn’t necessarily make me less of a feminist…

Floof

Floof is fascinated by shadows...

I think I post more photos of Floof here then either of the other cats; Brian and I definitely both take more pictures of her in general.  She’s very photogenic, and particularly silly, so it’s easy to catch her doing strange and adorable things.  Chester doesn’t really like the camera itself, annoying flashy thing that it is, and Sumi is just hard to see in photos because of her dark coat.

Isn’t she cute?

Basket o'Floof

Smart cat.

Lazy

My, haven’t I been lazy about my blog lately?  Well, my essay is just undergoing the finishing touches, my Mom likes it, and Brian thinks it’s decent, so it’s going out within a couple of days.  Me, I’m about to hit the gym here.  For old time’s sake, here are some videos of me at last spring’s Tactical Strength Challenge.  I had just hurt my shoulder and didn’t do so great, especially with the pullups.  It’s nice to look at things like this, it reminds me of how much progress I’ve made, bum shoulder or no.  It reminds me that lifting 200 lbs. was a big deal at one point.

Deadlift #1, 200 lbs.

Deadlift #2, 215 lbs.  I dropped the third one, lost my grip.

8 bodyweight pullups